I am sure it
roused her pity, for it struck in her another thought always
uppermost in the Marquesan bosom; and she began with a smiling
sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the
decease of her own people. 'Ici pas de Kanaques,' said she; and
taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both
her hands. 'Tenez--a little baby like this; then dead. All the
Kanaques die. Then no more.' The smile, and this instancing by
the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me
strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair. Meanwhile the
husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled
to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had
just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw
their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day
already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more
of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary
works and no more readers.

CHAPTER IV--DEATH

The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the
Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is
perhaps the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height
of males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in
action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and
duller, are still comely animals. To judge by the eye, there is no
race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands. When
Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the
inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the
same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual
natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman
Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but
two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both
Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the
christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must
have been neglected: 'He shall be able to see,' 'He shall be able
to tell,' 'He shall be able to charm,' said the friendly
godmothers; 'But he shall not be able to hear,' exclaimed the last.
The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred, when
the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months
later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread
like a fire about the valley, and in less than a year two
survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created solitude.
A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races, the
tragic residue of Britain. When I first heard this story the date
staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible. Early in
the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first
case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and
by the month of August, when the tale was told me, one soul
survived, and that was a boy who had been absent at his schooling.
And depopulation works both ways, the doors of death being set wide
open, and the door of birth almost closed. Thus, in the half-year
ending July 1888 there were twelve deaths and but one birth in the
district of the Hatiheu. Seven or eight more deaths were to be
looked for in the ordinary course; and M. Aussel, the observant
gendarme, knew of but one likely birth. At this rate it is no
matter of surprise if the population in that part should have
declined in forty years from six thousand to less than four
hundred; which are, once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the
estimated figures. And the rate of decline must have even
accelerated towards the end.

A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from
Anaho to Hatiheu on the adjacent bay. The road is good travelling,
but cruelly steep. We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted
house which stands highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily
down upon its roof; the Casco well out in the bay, and rolling for
a wager, shrank visibly; and presently through the gap of Tari's
isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang cloudlike on the horizon.